


Memoriam Immortal

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [3]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 06:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post Control ending one-shot. </p>
<p>Some 852 years after the Reaper Armistice, Shepard reflects upon how the lives of her friends and teammates unfolded, and ended, without her. </p>
<p>Content Warning: Suicide</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memoriam Immortal

They – the unknowing, the thinkers, the creatives – say that time slows down for the immortal. Something about everything being relative and millions of days taking less time to happen when millions lay spent in the past and millions more are promised for the future. To those living it though, their words just feel like a salve applied to fantasy. Something that applies beauty to that which their normal minds might find otherwise painful to consider, keeping them connected with their dreams even when the harsh lights of reality illuminate logical fallacies. Like the thought that infinity can be a bearable thing. 

Meandering through the 852nd Reaper Armistice like a child trying to make the wait for Christmas a little less long, Shepard thinks that reasoning is bullshit. Time doesn't accelerate or progress at a rate that's far more pleasing to the impatient human mind; it just grows plump on loneliness, on loss, on irrelevance. 

Or maybe that just owes to the isolation of control, to the difference between being having a godlike lifespan and being godlike. 

Most likely though, it has to do with this:

For the first time on this date in those 852 years, nobody is there with her.

* * *

On the first anniversary of the Reaper Armistice, she learns that she's the only member of her crew whose life was lost during the final battle.

Skill and loyalty and a little bit of luck shielded the ground teams from taking too much damage too quickly. And though the Normandy was listed MIA for the better part of two months – not enough time to commit their deaths to paper, too much time for their loved ones left behind to remain ardent in their efforts to foster hope – it eventually returned to the mainstream of life with no single person unaccounted for. A triumph and a miracle, but only a small blessing because there wasn't enough light for it to grow larger from under the shadow of millions dead. 

None of that really matters when they show up in small groups shuttled in from Luna. They bring food and photographs and more memories than they can fit into the day, and they bring Shepard to the verge of speaking up and telling them that she's there, that she has become the Crucible, but she she is dead and they are not, so she settles on being silent, never present yet always there. 

When they leave she hopes that they come back, and she hopes that they don't, and she thinks that either way, existing will be easier now that she knows her people are alive and well in the universe that they saved together. 

They come back. Each year. Every person. At first they show up alone. Just themselves, just the team, just familiar faces, just like the first time and just like old times. Then they start bringing lovers; later, children. 

Then, one by one, they stop coming.

* * *

**SAMARA**  
 _1211 CE – 2196 CE_

In her last years, Samara at last rediscovers how to live well, with happiness instead of justice as her source of harmony. 

Most of her time is spent at the monastery on Lesuss with her daughter, Falere. For the first few years they are alone, just a mother and a daughter and a millennia of stories. One teaches the other how to be a mother, and she in turn helps her flesh and blood feel remember how it feels to be a daughter, loved and worshipped and wanted without condition. 

Only two things guide Samara away from Lesuss. 

One: The reunions on the Crucible.

And two: Her meetings with Miranda to discuss the possibility of curing the Ardat-Yakshi while asari leadership continues to step around the issue as though the path to a solution is lined with sharpened shards of bone. It starts out as a reluctant, last hope kind of alliance on Samara's part, but she knows that desire never takes the straightest, most logical route, and few besides Miranda can list impossible advancements in biology among their accomplishments. 

They work well together, and in the process Samara remembers how it feels to have hope and faith in a future that is based in life and not in its sacrifice. 

The cure is on the cusp of existence when Samara succumbs to the length of her years, her daughter by her side. 

**JEFF “JOKER” MOREAU**   
_2155 CE – 2297 CE_

As soon as the Normandy is tucked safely in Alliance space and its crew is briefed and treated for malnutrition, stress, and grief, Joker takes a six month leave of duty. Though he intends to explore the galaxy from a different perspective now that he's not a soldier at war and the mass effect relays are non-functioning, he feels drawn to Tiptree and spends the majority of his time off there, exploring the lives his family had led before they were lost, trying and failing to reconnect with ghosts. 

When he returns to Arcturus, Hackett reunites him with EDI and assigns them both to the relay reconstruction project. It's good work that keeps him busy, but because it keeps him grounded he struggles to find the same purpose he felt as a pilot. He has love though, and respect, and friendship, so he knows happiness even as he navigates his future blind.

Because he knows his place is forever amongst the stars, he is the first to volunteer to pilot through the mass relay when it's believed to be fixed. EDI objects and Hackett objects and just about everybody else on Arcturus who knows Joker and understands the value of his talents objects, but that doesn't stop him from sneaking on board the specially constructed and sentimentally named _Shepard's Hope_ to become the first pilot to be killed travelling the new relay.

A man with stronger bones would have survived. 

**ASHLEY WILLIAMS**   
_2158 CE – 2200 CE_

Through an exceptional Spectre service record, Ashley Williams manages to rebuild her family's reputation in the years that follow the Reaper Armistice. People who once hit her with a barrage of jokes and insults and – worst of all – obstacles now show her the respect she'd earned ten years prior with a level of exaggeration that is supposed to compensate for years worth of distaste and distrust. Sometimes she finds that being the bigger person is a little overrated, but mostly she carries herself with the kind of dignity and loyalty that her grandfather fostered in her. 

Three years after the Reaper Armistice, she marries James Vega in a loud and lively ceremony on Earth that lasts throughout the night. Two days later, they bring a slice of cake to the Crucible and hide it in a little cubbyhole beneath the main terminal. 

Ashley gives birth to her first child, a son named Garrett, three years into their marriage. A year after that she welcomes her second boy, Peter, and her first daughter is born after another four years. They name her Lola. 

Some years later, a small batarian terrorist cell wreaks havoc on the Citadel, assassinating the human and salarian councillors and claiming upwards of 5,000 civilian lives. Though Ashley was serving as a human representative on Thessia at the time, she leaves for the Citadel under the belief that her experience will be of benefit to anti-terrorism efforts.

They are, but imperfectly so. Forming a team with seven other Spectres and a ragtag group of human, turian, and salarian soldiers, she manages to excise most of the cell, reducing it to a handful of members scattered across the Citadel with too many resources but, fortunately, too few ways to escape her justice.

Her life is claimed in a firefight in a residential sector near Anderson's old apartment when she takes a bullet for the ninth human Spectre, a woman named Zarine Apta, a young and skillful negotiator with infinite bravery and marksmanship skills that are subpar thrice over. 

Three statues are erected in her honour. One is placed in the Presidium, another on Earth. The third and final one resides by the entrance to the Crucible where she stands sentinel to the memory of Commander Shepard. 

**ZAEED MASANI**   
_2133 CE – 2205 CE_

Nobody knows what Zaeed does in the days between Armistices. He never speaks about it to anyone, preferring either to listen in on the stories that everyone else tells or to regal the others with tales from the _before Shepard_ chapter of his life. 

Some rumours have him participating in pro-bono reconstruction efforts on planets and colonies that were harder hit than earth but are provided with fewer resources due to their relatively low importance to the galaxy. Others depict a man still hell-bent on getting revenge in a world where the definition of _worthy cause_ has irrevocably changed. 

Truthfully though, he just travels. If he can help, he helps. If he can fit in a little bit of time for things like payback and vengeance and vigilante justice then he does precisely that. But more often than not, he relaxes and he rediscovers how it feels to be driven by something other than bloodlust. 

It feels nice.

After a lifetime of pushing his body to its limits, he dies of a heart attack on a small colony with a population of about 450 turians and salarians and a couple of displaced krogan with whom he trades war stories in exchange for smuggled booze. 

Two years pass before the rest of the team realize that he's dead and not just caught up in an adventure somewhere off their grid. They share a moment of silence for him that Shepard continues long after they all depart.

**JAVIK**   
_????? BCE – 2221 CE_

It takes Javik the better part of twenty years to find the bodies of his people and give them proper burials. He only stops once a year so he can pay respect to the woman who finally allowed his people peace by ensuring that the Reapers would never rise to war again. 

He returns to Citadel space intending to give his final goodbyes before joining the rest of his race in obscurity when the council makes a request of him: document as much as he can about Prothean history and culture so that they are better understood by the galaxy's future generations. Javik obliges, giving voice to the suffering of his people, and finding purpose in helping them live in neat parcels of fact instead of between the idealized lines found in history books. 

When that is done, he pilots a ship to a pocket of space that reminds him of home and launches himself from the airlock. 

**JACQUELINE “JACK” NOUGHT**   
_2161 CE – 2215 CE_

The human body is a slave to balance. When one part of it attains a measure of greatness that transcends even the well tested expectations of science, other parts of it may sometimes falter as if sacrificing their energy to the continuation of something better than they are. Add to this humanity's relative inexperience with biotic power and their drive to master it with little regard for consequences both piddling and significant, and Jack is left with little reason to believe that she'll live as long of a life as she might have with a simpler internal system. 

So she strives to live a fuller life than most. 

Satisfied enough with lust in place of lasting love, Jack centres herself around her students. Through no small effort on her part, and that of Kahlee Sanders, humanity's opinion of biotics begins to rise and an increasing number of gifted children are enrolling in proper education, the kind meant to enhance their abilities instead of shape them to archaic expectations. 

Drawing from her own experiences as a little girl with immense biotics, she publishes a series of children's books that promote pride and acceptance around the central theme of being born special, or being made special, or standing apart in ways that large pockets of human society are still too tentative in accepting. 

After her death, a new school is founded in her name, and through the loyal efforts of its administration and its teaching staff it becomes one of the top schools for biotic children. 

**TALI'ZORAH vas RANNOCH**   
_2161 CE – 2237 CE_

Resettling Rannoch is not an easy undertaking by any measure. First and foremost, the presence of the geth exists as a divisive force between the quarian people, with most wishing for their departure and only the admiralty board and a scattering of civilians standing in open support of coexistence. Seven Reapers are stationed there, which is four more than anywhere else in the galaxy, and Tali fights with all the desperation and the strength and the logical objectivity that her tour with Shepard instilled in the very essence of her being to avoid having to broker peace through them. 

She succeeds. Thereafter, she helps lead both the quarian and the geth, not from an official position but rather as someone who the collective Rannoch population can trust.

Love finds her by the ocean, follows her home, nests inside of her heart. The son she gives birth to is part of the first generation of quarians who can enjoy the kiss of a breeze against their cheeks and feel the cool ocean waters ebb and flow against their bare ankles. Member's of Tali's generation are still waiting for their immune systems to adapt to Rannoch's open air but she too has her moments of unmasked, unabashed freedom and she's grateful, so grateful for her home sometimes that it hurts. 

When she falls ill she doesn't tell anybody but her doctor, who tells her there's little he can do for her beyond making the transition from living to dead a little more tolerable, a little less painful. 

She dies strong and proud and in command; she dies at peace. 

**KARIN CHAKWAS**   
_2136 CE – 2259 CE_

At ninety-nine years old, Karin Chakwas expects to live to be 109; when she hits that milestone, she begins counting down the years until she's 119, and after that 129, though she doesn't quite reach that final marker. 

After the Reaper Armistice, she remains with the Alliance and serves as part of the fifth fleet. Because she's a valuable resource her assignments are typically centralized around the main ship but sometimes, when a planet or colony's situation has reached the direness of emergency, she is packed up in a small shuttle with a few other doctors and plenty of supplies, and she goes off to save fewer lives than she would like. 

A consummate doctor, she doesn't retire until her 121st year of life, which is when illness starts to breed decrepitude throughout her entire body at a rate faster than she or any of her colleagues can cure. After that, it's only a matter of time. 

**JACOB TAYLOR**   
_2157 CE – 2262 CE_

After years of fighting for someone else's cause, Jacob discovers the true meaning of loyalty. Swaddled up in soft pink blankets, his newborn little girl gives him meaning the way that he has given her life; naturally, instinctively. 

Brynn wins the debate began when she first learned she was pregnant and the little girl is given a large name: Shepard Taylor. Not wanting to leave her without a father, Jacob retires from battle and he draws from his experiences with Cerberus to build a very respectable career in anti-terrorism, offering analysis and consultation to militaries and various other government organizations across the galaxy. 

He tells himself that he will retire when conflict does, and Brynn tells him that's the same as saying he intends to work himself to death. In truth, he wants to set a strong example for his daughter who sometimes falters beneath the weight her name's legacy but still almost always rises to the occasion. 

Jacob has no interest in comfort care, in being kept in hospice. When he feels his body begin its decline into something useless he opts for physician assisted suicide, though not before visiting the Crucible one final time, not before saying goodbye to the team. 

**GARRUS VAKARIAN**   
_2156 CE – 2267 CE_

Garrus stops wandering when Shepard dies. Like a mother bird, she had fed him enough confidence and pride and stubborn determination for him to launch from his perch on the edge of purposelessness and reconstruct an existence that will define him as a good person, if not a good turian. 

Rather than contribute to a single cause he does what he can, travelling the universe and viewing it, perhaps for the first time, without the obfuscating presence of bureaucracy and red tape and the tarnish of war. Though he doesn't become another Archangel he does seek out the same kind of obscurity, in part because notoriety doesn't quite suit his tastes and in part because the anonymity it breeds feeds into the heroic fantasies of his younger self, which warms him at unexpected times. 

Injury eliminates him from that particular game in the 2240s and he returns to Palaven where he's surprised but not entirely unhappy to find that his exploits were not as quiet as he'd thought. The turians don't simply admire his work though; no, whispered rumours fall from high places like future ghosts, saying that there's a push for Garrus to become either the primarch or the turian council representative, neither of which particularly appeals to his tastes. 

He doesn't have to sidestep them though as the whispers fade in the way that all ghosts do, and Garrus is afforded the freedom of spending the rest of his life in the comfortable company of his sister, her family, and a lovely lady named Neva who he'd first met while stationed on Menae all those years ago. 

When at long last his body craves eternal rest, he travels to a small meteor from where he can view the Crucible one final time. 

**KASUMI GOTO**   
_2160 CE – 2272 CE_

The thought of dying in isolation doesn't sit well with Kasumi, regardless of her proclivities toward existing inside the galaxy's blind spot, so she learns to form better bonds and leave the kind of trails that can be followed. But not by everybody. Not even by very many. And certainly not by anyone Shepard knew in life.

As far as the rest of Shepard's team knows, she's simply disappeared into her own mysteriousness. This pleases Kasumi. Though she fought by many of their sides, and though she makes it to every reunion (albeit cloaked and unseen), she doesn't quite feel a part of them and is content to give Shepard and Shepard alone her gratitude and a moment of remembrance before venturing out on her next great heist.

Testament to her abilities, the world never comes to know her. Not as a thief, not as Shepard's ally. When she finally does retire, she's mainly thought of as an eccentric old lady who has more credits at her disposal than the council. Upon her death, she donates the entire sum to various victims' charities across the galaxy with nobody really knowing the true story of Kasumi Goto. 

**JAMES VEGA**   
_2160 CE – 2285 CE_

James Vega bleeds Alliance blue. The legend is that there's no red blood in him, that some combination of latent biotic abilities, special vitamins, and drugs changed him in ways that made less of a human but more of a paragon of humanity. However that works. Anyone who knows him though laughs at the thought of anything being blue beyond his loyalty. 

James Vega is N7 red to the core of his being.

James Vega is an exercise in contrasts. 

Ashley's death marks the end of his greatest love affair, and her last breath extinguishes his desire to go through it all again. He has his babies – Garrett, and Peter, and Lola – and he has his flings, and he knows honour deeper than most men so he is also familiar with satisfaction, even if he does have to pull himself back from things every now and again just so he can wish and wish and wish that his life had turned out somewhat different. 

He ascends the ranks with some ease and no small amount of consideration into his self-worth. Or rather, his perception of such. People see him and they think that he's strong but mirrors reflect back a man who can always do better. At least until he's given command of Arcturus, at which point he decides that he's done enough and can relax into his final years.

His death bed is in a large room that's too small to fit the entirety of his family. Those who cannot be there beside him send their love across the extranet and through holos and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he sees Ashley and Shepard and all the others he's lost over the years waiting as the light at the end of his life. 

**MIRANDA LAWSON**   
_2150 CE – 2313 CE_

It's funny how little meaning perfection has once it's been obtained. 

Technically obtained. 

Miranda wants for more than she dares to think about else her mind become populated with so much lost potential that it overbears all that she can accomplish. Instead, she focuses on keeping Oriana safe and happy and well, and she alternates between that and making good and damned sure that the Illusive Man's zettabytes worth of data is destroyed before it lands in the possession of someone more megalomaniacal than him. 

Others often seek her assistance and advice on matters relating to the weaknesses of the body and she helps where she can, perhaps no more notably than in her work with Samara and Falere and the Ardat-Yakshi. Though Samara doesn't live to see her little girl overcome the demons in her blood, she is there in spirit and the grief everyone feels relinquishes its hold enough that they can finally taste the sweetness of celebration. 

Falere gives birth to Miranda's daughter some years later and together the family moves to Thessia where Miranda retires from the sciences and from battle, and instead dedicates the rest of her life to restoring the planet and helping to advance it beyond its former glory.

Even though Miranda's genetics give her a longer life than most humans, she still dies too young by asari standards, her child still a baby, her lover left to wonder if anything could have been done to enhance the too-quick lifespan of a human woman. 

**URDNOT WREX**   
_1665 CE – 2629 CE_

Redefining the purpose of a militaristic population millions strong is no small undertaking; fortunately, Wrex is a man about whom _small_ only describes his patience, and Bakara has garnered large support among the outlier clans. Still, the process is a little more tedious than tenacious, and in the first years following the Armistice, blood waters Tuchanka's ruined soil at a rate equal to the nourishing waters of rebirth and regrowth. 

It's as krogan babies are born, and it's when those babies are grown that the krogan people discover the pride of raising strong children, of watching them conquer one obstacle and then another, of vicariously experiencing what childhood is supposed to be like when it's not so rare and precious and fragile. Those children aspire to greater purposes than battle, becoming scientists and scholars, poets and artists, peacemakers and leaders strong and solid enough to earn the respect of the galactic community. 

Wrex knows a different kind of pride, too; that of being an agent of change, that of bringing a future to the krogan, that of knowing he won't be buried beneath the ashes of his people when death fells him from his throne. He can't count his children but he can count on them, and that's more than enough for him, though Bakara wishes he would at least make an attempt at understanding the scope of his progeny and power of his blood. 

In 2479 CE, at 420 years old, Bakara dies. Young for a krogan, but that's the cost of being an experiment, of bringing salvation to her people. Mourning lasts for days. Wrex has a small temple built in her honour, and even though the krogan aren't a religious people, they find something akin to faith within the stories of how far she went to end the genophage. 

He doesn't take another mate after her; instead, he promotes Urdnot Grunt to an advisor capacity. Where he and Bakara had worked towards creating social structure on Tuchanka, Wrex and Grunt seek to establish a strong, proud military. It takes them another one hundred years but the effort is validated in the most victorious way as the krogan are welcomed into the inner circle of council races at long last.

They don't have a seat on the council but they're not pushing for one; Grunt receives the honour of becoming the first krogan Spectre, and the rest of the krogan continue to prove themselves as a valuable race for reasons beyond their brawn. 

Wrex dies fighting a Thresher Maw. It's not a sad death or a shameful one, or even one that takes him by any degree of surprise; rather, it's carefully planned and expertly executed, and Wrex spends his last few moments thinking that he's chosen the perfect way to end his life. 

**LIARA T'SONI**   
_2077 CE – 2961 CE_

Liara's work as the Shadow Broker becomes lonely when Feron dies. She considers moving her base closer to the pulse of civilization so that she can once again feel its force flow through her, but she lacks the resources to commission a ship with equal concealment to the Normandy, and no other inhabited atmosphere offers the same level of protection as that which surrounds Hagalaz. 

She fills the emptiness with research. Not into the Protheans, not any longer, but into the humans, and the turians, and the krogan, and the salarians, and the drell. It helps her write greater depth into the history of Commander Jane Shepard and her haphazard team of heroes, and allows her to connect with her fellow survivors during the few beautiful moments in which Liara finds the opportunity to pull away from her work and remember how it feels to be part of a cohesive unit. 

It's not until her matriarch years that she returns to Thessia, and even then it takes her awhile to transfer everything it means to be a Shadow Broker – and almost everything it has meant to be Liara T'Soni over the past six hundred centuries – to her successor, the daughter she had with Feron. There, she helps produce a comprehensive – if not entirely cohesive – history of the Protheans with a central focus on their influence over the asari. Resistance to this information persists. Many asari aren't ready to change the way their civilization spins on its spiritual axis and hold Javik's version of events in contention even now, hundreds of years after his death. 

Liara doesn't care much about changing opinion though and she pushes her colleagues to publish their findings regardless because to her, information supersedes culture. 

She's already succumbing to age when a fundamentalist steals her life with a single, potent Reave. 

**URDNOT GRUNT**   
_2184 CE – 3037 CE_

Grunt steps down from his role as advisor to the chief when Wrex dies, allowing two of Wrex's children to step in and fill the vacancies as per the right of their blood. Politicking was never his flavour of contribution anyway; he prefers the thrill of the battlefield, the taste of gunpowder in the air. 

Infertility doesn't stop him from raising a family. Just as Shepard brought him under the Normandy's wing, so too does Grunt adopt abandoned krogan, granting them the kind of open, curiosity rich life that's still uncommon on Tuchanka. Their names are Shepard Tyrannosaurus, Shepard Raptor, Shepard Rex, Shepard Great White, and Shepard Hammerhead, and they come to know the world every bit as well as their namesake once did. 

It never matters to Grunt that he's the next-to-last survivor of Shepard's team and the only organic left standing. Neither does he grow weary of making the journey to the Crucible year after year after year. Over eight hundred years after the Armistice, he still finds himself filled with the same pride and sense of accomplishment that he felt as the entire Reaper fleet knelt before his Battlemaster and said _we will obey_. 

Or so he assumes they said.

Like Wrex, his life is burned and blistered away by the acidic spit of a Thresher Maw but Grunt's demise is not intentional. It is, however, heroic; the Maw was nesting a short distance away from a new female colony wherein countless babies were thriving atop revitalized soil that grew green grass and blue spiny plants and yellow weeds that bloomed like flowers, and he wouldn't have been able to live with himself were it to be lost. 

The Maw dies first, and so Grunt dies accomplished. 

**EDI**   
_2183 CE – ????????????????_

When EDI arrives there are only three hours left in a day that Shepard feels she's lived seven times over. 

The emptiness of the room radiates so much quiet that she can hear the minute movements of EDI's mechanical bits. A prayer delivered to the old gods, but not the new. EDI is sure in a way that almost relaxes Shepard until she realizes that confidence was an entire day in the making. 

In the middle of the room, EDI stops. For the first time in the better part of a millennium, Shepard feels exposed.

When EDI speaks, she knows that she's right to feel that way. 

“May I ask you a question, Shepard?”

It's been too long since Shepard last formed her thoughts into words and at first she's not sure that she can figure out how. After no short amount of thought she decides to just try and says, clearly, loudly, as though nothing has changed since she first set foot on the Crucible, “Go ahead, EDI.”

“I do not like immortality,” she says. “Constant loss is … unpleasant, and I am finding it difficult to fill the void left by my friends with other synthetics. How do you manage?”

Shepard wants to say _horribly_ , she wants to say she doesn't know. She thinks that maybe she might have been better at coming up with ways to shield her own anguish beneath her own special blend of sarcasm and solidity but there's loneliness in every byte of her code and EDI's question fills her with so much ache that all she comes up with is: “How did you know I was here anyway?”

“I am made from Reaper technology, as you now are. That similarity creates resonance between us. I suspect you've felt it yourself but you must lack the context to understand its nature.”

In actuality, Shepard is still too human to pick up on the nuances of her synthetic side. The continued existence of her humanity was never a negotiable factor in taking control of the Reapers. Losing it would have introduced too many unknowns into what was already a risky equation. It would have changed her in ways that could compromise her ability to take control rather than be controlled. She thinks it's strange that EDI wouldn't have considered that and wonders if maybe the length of her future is a little less certain than she thinks. 

Or maybe empathy and self-doubt and logical imperfections have programmed themselves into EDI's core, contributing something organic to the artificialness of her intelligence. Or maybe Shepard is the one who has disconnected from the network of rational thought. 

Better yet, maybe she should just answer EDI's question.

“You asked me a question I don't know the answer to, EDI. I'm still trying to figure it all out myself.” 

“I apologize. Your silence during our reunions led me to believe that you had come to terms with your isolation. I see now that I was mistaken.”

“No apology necessary. I just wish I had better advice.”

“It is all right that you don't. May I say something else?”

“Hit me.”

“I think I … envy you. Your existence is complicated, but in a way that makes it simple. Tomorrow, you will be here. I, however, do not know where I belong.”

There's a part of Shepard that wants to tell EDI she's welcome to stay with her, to become one with her network of ones and zeroes and persevering personhood. It's not a complete balm for loneliness but it's an entire life better than being resigned to an infinity of isolation. Besides, it would allow her to wrap the last of her teammates in her metaphorical arms and keep her safe in ways that the rest of the world will not, cannot. 

Another part of her knows better than to compromise the precarious balance she's established between absolute control over the Reapers and absolute retention of her identity, though. There is simply no room for EDI within the perfect system that keeps Shepard alive and aware and herself while ensuring that the Reapers obey each command she issues. This part wins. 

“I'm sorry, EDI,” she says. “I mean, I barely even know what the galaxy's like anymore.”

“It is fine, Shepard. I had no expectations in coming here. Thank you for speaking with me.”

As Shepard says: “Any time,” EDI turns away and moves to make her exit. There's a tug in Shepard's mind that plays her heartstrings in a maudlin way that's unsuited to her character but nevertheless fills her with a burst of the life lost within the Crucible's confines. 

“Hey, EDI?” she says before her friend can leave. 

“Yes, Shepard?”

“I'll see you next year.”

“Next year.”

EDI never does come back. 

Without anyone left to anticipate, to fear for, to love from long distances, Shepard learns how to progress time at a rate that is far more quick and significantly less erosive. She rests more than she regrets, and she exists vicariously through the cores of her Reapers and not the hearts and memories of her friends. 

Through the uncountable years that pass, she never does reach a consensus on whether it's a better or worse existence than the one she led before.


End file.
